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• Vedanti and Max Sound vs. Google

  14 août 2014, par Multimedia Mike — Legal/Ethical

  Vedanti Systems Limited (VSL) and Max Sound Coporation filed a lawsuit against Google recently. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t care about corporate legal battles. However, this one interests me because it’s multimedia-related. I’m curious to know how coding technology patents might hold up in a real court case.

  Here’s the most entertaining complaint in the lawsuit :

  Despite Google’s well-publicized Code of Conduct — “Don’t be Evil” — which it explains is “about doing the right thing,” “following the law,” and “acting honorably,” Google, in fact, has an established pattern of conduct which is the exact opposite of its claimed piety.

  I wonder if this is the first known case in which Google has been sued over its long-obsoleted “Don’t be evil” mantra ?

  Researching The Plaintiffs
  
  I think I made a mistake by assuming this lawsuit might have merit. My first order of business was to see what the plaintiff organizations have produced. I have a strong feeling that these might be run of the mill patent trolls.

  VSL currently has a blank web page. Further, the Wayback Machine only has pages reaching back to 2011. The earliest page lists these claims against a plain black background (I’ve highlighted some of the more boisterous claims and the passages that make it appear that Vedanti doesn’t actually produce anything but is strictly an IP organization) :

  The inventions key :
  The patent and software reduced any data content, without compressing, up to a 97% total reduction of the data which also produces a lossless result. This physics based invention is often called the Holy Grail.

  Vedanti Systems Intellectual Property
  Our strategic IP portfolio is granted in all of the world’s largest technology development and use countries. A major value indemnification of our licensee products is the early date of invention filing and subsequent Issue. Vedanti IP has an intrinsic 20 year patent protection and valuation in royalties and licensing. The original data transmission art has no prior art against it.

  Vedanti Systems invented among other firsts, The Slice and Partitioning of Macroblocks within a RGB Tri level region in a frame to select or not, the pixel.

  Vedanti Systems invention is used in nearly every wireless chipset and handset in the world

  Our original pixel selection system revolutionized wireless handset communications. An example of this system “Slice” and “Macroblock Partitioning” is used throughout Satellite channel expansion, Wireless partitioning, Telecom – Video Conferencing, Surveillance Cameras, and 2010 developing Media applications.

  Vedanti Systems is a Semiconductor based software, applications, and IP Continuations Intellectual Property company.

  Let’s move onto the other plaintiff, Max Sound. They have a significantly more substantive website. They also have an Android app named Spins HD Audio, which appears to be little more than a music player based on the screenshots.

  Max Sound also has a stock ticker symbol : MAXD. Something clicked into place when I looked up their ticker symbol : While worth only a few pennies, it was worth a few more pennies after this lawsuit was announced, which might be one of the motivations behind the lawsuit.

  Here’s a trick I learned when I was looking for a new tech job last year : When I first look at a company’s website and am trying to figure out what they really do, I head straight to their jobs/careers page. A lot of corporate websites have way too much blathering corporatese that can be tough to cut through. But when I see what mix of talent and specific skills they are hoping to hire, that gives me a much better portrait of what the company does.

  The reason I bring this up is because this tech company doesn’t seem to have jobs/careers page.

  The Lawsuit
  The core complaint centers around Patent 7974339 : Optimized data transmission system and method. It was filed in July 2004 (or possibly as early as January 2002), issued in July 2011, and assigned (purchased ?) by Vedanti in May 2012. The lawsuit alleges that nearly everything Google has ever produced (or, more accurately, purchased) leverages the patented technology.

  The patent itself has 5 drawings. If you’ve ever seen a multimedia codec patent, or any whitepaper on a multimedia codec, you’ve seen these graphs before. E.g., “Raw pixels come in here -> some analysis happens here -> more analysis happens over here -> entropy coding -> final bitstream”. The text of a patent document isn’t meant to be particularly useful. I’ve tried to understand this stuff before and it never goes well. Skimming the text, I just see a blur of the words data, transmission, pixel, and matrix.

  So I read the complaint to try to figure out what this is all about. To summarize the storyline as narrated by the lawsuit, some inventors were unhappy with the state of video compression in 2001 and endeavored to create something better. So they did, and called it the VSL codec. This codec is so far undocumented on the MultimediaWiki, so it probably has yet to be seen “in the wild”. Good luck finding hard technical data on it now since searches for “VSL codec” are overwhelmed by articles about this lawsuit. Also, the original codec probably wasn’t called VSL because VSL is apparently an IP organization formed much later.

  Then, the protagonists of the lawsuit patented the codec. Then, years later, Google wanted to purchase a video codec that they could open source and use to supplant H.264.

  The complaint goes on to allege that in 2010, Google specifically contacted VSL to possibly license or acquire this mysterious VSL technology. Google was allegedly allowed to study the technology, eventually decided not to continue discussions, and shipped back the proprietary materials.

  Here’s where things get weird. When Google shipped back the materials, they allegedly shipped back a bunch of Post-It notes. The notes are alleged to contain a ton of incriminating evidence. The lawsuit claims that the notes contained such tidbits as :

  • Google was concerned that its infringement could be considered “recklessness” (the standard applicable to willful infringement) ;
  • Google personnel should “try” to destroy incriminating emails ;
  • Google should consider a “design around” because it was facing a “risk of litigation.”

  Actually, given Google’s acquisition of On2, I can totally believe that last one (On2’s codecs have famously contained a lot of weirdness which is commonly suspected to be attributable to designing around known patents).

  Anyway, a lot of this case seems to hinge on the authenticity of these Post-It notes :

  “65. The Post-It notes are unequivocal evidence of Google’s knowledge of the ’339 Patent and infringement by Defendants”

  I wish I could find a stock photo of a stack of Post-It notes in an evidence bag.

  I’ve worked at big technology companies. Big tech companies these days are very diligent about indoctrinating employees about IP liability issues. The reason this Post-It situation strikes me as odd is because the alleged contents of the notes basically outline everything the corporate lawyers tell you NOT to do.

  Analysis
  I’m trying to determine what specific algorithms and coding techniques. I guess I was expecting to see a specific claim that, “Our patent outlines this specific coding technique and here is unequivocal proof that Google A) uses the same technique, and B) specifically did so after looking at our patent.” I didn’t find that (well, a bit of part B, c.f., the Post-It note debacle), but maybe that’s not how these patent lawsuits operate. I’ve never kept up before.

  Maybe it’s just a patent troll. Maybe it’s for the stock bump. I’m expecting to see pump-n-dump stock spam featuring the stock symbol MAXD anytime now.

  I’ve never been interested in following a lawsuit case carefully before. I suddenly find myself wondering if I can subscribe to the RSS feed for this case ? Too much to hope for. But I found this item through Pando and maybe they’ll stay on top of it.

• HTTP : improve performance by reducing forward seeks

  30 janvier 2017, par Joel Cunningham

  HTTP : improve performance by reducing forward seeks
  This commit optimizes HTTP performance by reducing forward seeks, instead
  
  favoring a read-ahead and discard on the current connection (referred to
  
  as a short seek) for seeks that are within a TCP window’s worth of data.
  
  This improves performance because with TCP flow control, a window’s worth
  
  of data will be in the local socket buffer already or in-flight from the
  
  sender once congestion control on the sender is fully utilizing the window.
  Note : this approach doesn’t attempt to differentiate from a newly opened
  
  connection which may not be fully utilizing the window due to congestion
  
  control vs one that is. The receiver can’t get at this information, so we
  
  assume worst case ; that full window is in use (we did advertise it after all)
  
  and that data could be in-flight
  The previous behavior of closing the connection, then opening a new
  
  with a new HTTP range value results in a massive amounts of discarded
  
  and re-sent data when large TCP windows are used.  This has been observed
  
  on MacOS/iOS which starts with an initial window of 256KB and grows up to
  
  1MB depending on the bandwidth-product delay.
  When seeking within a window’s worth of data and we close the connection,
  
  then open a new one within the same window’s worth of data, we discard
  
  from the current offset till the end of the window.  Then on the new
  
  connection the server ends up re-sending the previous data from new
  
  offset till the end of old window.
  Example (assumes full window utilization) :
  TCP window size : 64KB
  
  Position : 32KB
  
  Forward seek position : 40KB
        *                      (Next window)
  
  32KB |--------------| 96KB |---------------| 160KB
  
          *
  
    40KB |---------------| 104KB
  Re-sent amount : 96KB - 40KB = 56KB
  For a real world test example, I have MP4 file of 25MB, which ffplay
  
  only reads 16MB and performs 177 seeks. With current ffmpeg, this results
  
  in 177 HTTP GETs and 73MB worth of TCP data communication.  With this
  
  patch, ffmpeg issues 4 HTTP GETs and 3 seeks for a total of 22MB of TCP data
  
  communication.
  To support this feature, the short seek logic in avio_seek() has been
  
  extended to call a function to get the short seek threshold value.  This
  
  callback has been plumbed to the URLProtocol structure, which now has
  
  infrastructure in HTTP and TCP to get the underlying receiver window size
  
  via SO_RCVBUF.  If the underlying URL and protocol don’t support returning
  
  a short seek threshold, the default s->short_seek_threshold is used
  This feature has been tested on Windows 7 and MacOS/iOS.  Windows support
  
  is slightly complicated by the fact that when TCP window auto-tuning is
  
  enabled, SO_RCVBUF doesn’t report the real window size, but it does if
  
  SO_RCVBUF was manually set (disabling auto-tuning). So we can only use
  
  this optimization on Windows in the later case
  Signed-off-by : Joel Cunningham <joel.cunningham@me.com>
  
  Signed-off-by : Michael Niedermayer <michael@niedermayer.cc>
  

  • [DH] libavformat/avio.c
  • [DH] libavformat/avio.h
  • [DH] libavformat/aviobuf.c
  • [DH] libavformat/http.c
  • [DH] libavformat/tcp.c
  • [DH] libavformat/url.h

• Including ffmpeg in qt project on windows causes the program to unexpectedly finish

  1er avril 2016, par Burn-Man

  I am trying to include ffmpeg in my qt project on windows. I am running QT4 and compiling with microsoft visual compiler 2010 on 32 bit windows 7. I am trying to include ffmpeg 2.8 which I got the dev and shared downloads from zeranoe. When I run it I get the following output :

  Starting (executable path)...
  
  The program has unexpectedly finished.
  
  (executable path) exited with code -1073741819

  I am able to produce this output with the following :

  ffmpeg_test.pro :

  QT += core
  
  TARGET = ffmpeg_test
  
  
  
  INCLUDEPATH += (ffmpeg dev path)/include
  
  LIBS += -L(ffmpeg dev path)/lib
  
  LIBS += -lavformat
  
  
  
  SOURCES += main.cpp

  main.cpp :

  extern "C"
  
  {
  
  #ifndef __STDC_CONSTANT_MACROS
  
  #define __STDC_CONSTANT_MACROS
  
  #endif
  
  #include <libavformat></libavformat>avformat.h>
  
  }
  
  
  
  int main(int argc, char *argv[])
  
  {
  
    av_register_all();
  
    return 0;
  
  }

  I have put the .dll files from the ffmpeg share bin into the same folder that QT builds ffmpeg_test.exe into. I have also confirmed that they are found using dependency walker which shows a question mark when they are not in that directory and the avformat-56.dll file path when they are (the fact that the .dll files are found does not effect the output of the program).

  Dependency walker does reveal that something weird is going on as there are no expected functions, but the functions found in avformat-56.dll look correct. I also have ran Dumpbin.exe /EXPORTS on avformat.lib and it also looks fine (I can post output if it would be helpful). It is worth noting that I have included this version of ffmpeg in a different application on this machine, it was not a qt project however. That project generated its make file with CMake rather than QMake and was built with Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 rather than QT Creator.

  I have also included other .lib/.dll pairs in qt and they have no problems. I am noticing two differences from those pairs. First in the ffmpeg-dev lib folder instead of having only .lib files (as is the case for all my other .lib/.dll pairs) I also have a .def and a .dll.a file for each library. Second ffmpeg is a c library whereas all my other included libraries are c++.

  update 3/29 :

  I have tried replacing the LIBS lines in my .pro with both of the following :

  LIBS += (ffmpeg dev path)/lib/avformat.lib

  LIBS += (ffmpeg dev path)/lib/libavformat.dll.a

  Both give the same error message. I have also tried adding the following to my .pro file also with no effect.

  DEFINES += __STDC_CONSTANT_MACROS
QMAKE_CXX_FLAGS += -D_STDC_CONSTANT_MACROS

  Additionally I tried adding #define inline __inline to main.cpp as suggested on the ffmpeg website. Any ideas of things to try would be hugely appreciated !

  update 3/31 :

  I have tried to start over with a new Windows build environment but the result remains unchanged with the test code above. (The new environment was able to run a hello world program).

  My process for setting up this environment was to install a fresh version of 32 bit windows 7. Install Visual C++ 2010 Express from the Visual Studio 2010 Express All-in-one ISO. Install Qt 4.8.6 for 32 bit windows and Visual Studio 2010. And finally install Qt Creator 2.5.2. To set up Qt creator I went under tools->options and told it where to find the Qt 4.8.6 qmake. I downloaded the dev and shared builds for ffmpeg 2.8 from Zeranoe. I was missing stdint.h and inttypes so I downloaded them and put the files in /include/libavutil. Then I corrected any of the header files that complained from to "stdint.h" ect. I then put the dll files from ffmpeg-2.8-win32-shared/bin into the folder where qt was building ffmpeg_test ffmpeg_test-build-desktop-Qt_4_8_6__4_8_6__Release/release.